Kitchen reno, or why we're born with two kidneys when we only need one

The most dramatic changes of all, so far, happened this week. The plumbing is roughed in. The old appliances are gone (they were living in the driveway). The drywall ("rock" in construction-speak) is all up, taped and the seams have stuff (Leslie-speak) on them. Fans have been going 24 hours a day for three days now to dry the stuff. Amazingly, it looks like it could become a room, yes, even a kitchen! My wish to have enough lighting to make it look like a prison yard looks like it will come true. The lathe and mud for the stucco patches was applied today. I bet Alan even nailed the lathe to the studs. Wow! It's really coming along.

I have learned that with progress comes check writing, and I keep writing them for things I knew about (Alan) and things I should have expected (the final 20% for the cabinets). Alan is moving rapidly through the job, which is great, but it means he's meeting his payment targets. Ouch.

Every time I think I've selected the last thing I need, something else comes up. This week it was the trim for the tile. Turns out you can't have tile come half way up a wall and not edge it with trim. No way. Nor do you put stupid pieces of framing around windows because you're not sure how to tile around a corner (like the former owners did).  So I trotted off to the tile store on Saturday to select the trim. We found a lovely trim that coordinated with the tile and the granite, and the nice lady gave us two tile samples in addition to the trim sample.

On Tuesday morning, Alan called to explain all the different reasons the trim would not work. It's a quarter round, we need three-quarter round, lots of math involving the mud and the tile and the word "concave" over and over and me finally saying "Just tell me what I need to get." Tuesday night I went back to the tile store, emerging with the trim the nice lady initially told me would work for our job and I rejected before I knew it costs $12-$14 per 8" piece. I mean, come on, it's a piece of glass tile not something that was made by unicorns!

Enter (or exit, as it were) that superfluous kidney. I wonder what they're going for these days?